Unplugged by Alice in Chains was recorded live as part of MTV's Unplugged Series. This is one of the more successful Unplugged albums, perhaps in large part due to the fact that the lead singer, Layne Staley, was on a steep decline toward dying from an addiction to drugs and hadn't performed with the band regularly for years.

When I reviewed the eponymous Alice in Chains last year, my summary was that it wasn't as good as their earlier albums. Happily, the songs chosen for the Unplugged set taken from the Alice in Chains album are the strongest ones off an otherwise weak album.

Unplugged is an excellent album and well worth your time. I don't review live albums frequently (it's not really up to me, of course), and one neat thing is that the performance of this album can be watched anytime thanks to the power of the internet:

Recently I've been doing a little tuning of my shell environment, swapping old tools for new ones and tweaking various settings. I thought I'd highlight a few of them.

Ghostty

For years I used iTerm2 as a replacement for the default Mac OS Terminal app. Recently I've switched to Ghostty. It's just as configurable in the ways I care about as iTerm2, but much, much faster. I sometimes have reason to paste a decent amount of text into the terminal and Ghostty handles it much faster than iTerm2. Overall it just feels more modern and slicker than iTerm2.

Starship

In the screenshot above you can see a few shell prompts showing what Starship can do. For example, when you're in a folder containing a programming project, it will show you the language in use. For example in the "sshaws_rust" folder you can see "🦀 v1.97.1", which shows my current version of Rust installed. Similarly you can see "☕️ v17.0.8" for Java, "🆂 v3.8.4" for Scala, and "🐍 v3.12.12" for Python. It also shows you stats about your machine (e.g. free RAM), what directory you're currently in, or how long a command took to run.

In the screenshot below, you can see the "🌏 marzipan" which shows that this is a remote machine named "marzipan," which helps prevent confusion about what machine you're on.

zoxide

I haven't been using this very long, and I'm still getting used to it, but zoxide is a handy way to navigate around your folder hierarchy. In the first screenshot above you can see that z core took me straight to that directory and zi opens an interactive search function.

fzf

Like most, I'm sure, I end up typing the same or very similar commands repeatedly. "Ctrl-r" is the standard way of searching for previous commands. fzf turbo-charges this and works very well.

bat

The Unix/Linux command cat is over fifty years old, and I've been using it for almost thirty. bat replaces it and includes syntax highlighting and line numbers. Because I've been using cat for so long, and have muscle memory for cat, I've set an alias from cat to bat.

eza

Combined with a Nerd Font (I use "Inconsolata Nerd Font Mono"), eza replaces the built in ls and ls -l with a much fancier directory listing. In the screenshot above you can see that each document type gets a little icon, and there are far more color codes than plain ls. The columns shown in the -l view can also be customized much more than vanilla ls.

ripgrep

Many years ago I started using grin which is (was?) a recursive grep utility. Being a Python 2 utility and Python 2 reached end-of-life in 2020, I switched to grin3. Now I'm getting used to using ripgrep, which A) is faster than grin3, and B) is maintained while grin3 is not.

oh my zsh

I've been using zsh for years, and oh my zsh helps configure it with all kinds of goodies.

Raycast

It's not a command line utilty, but Raycast has proven invaluable. It's a supercharged Spotlight replacement. It has many useful features, not least of which is the Clipboard History. The Calculator is great for quick math and unit conversion.

Confguration Files

If you want to see my configuration files, just drop me a line!

It's been a busy week and this review is being posted less than four hours before it would be considered late. I have reasons to keep this short. Beats, Rhymes & Life by A Tribe Called Quest debuted at #1 and went on to sell over one million copies.

In my opinion, it's a decent album, but not as good as The Low End Theory.

In a sense, I'm late on this review of Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt. It reached #10 last week after 29 weeks on the chart. Luckily for me, this week's chart has the same ten albums, so I'm not delaying a review of any other album by being late, so it all works out.

Tragic Kingdom was No Doubt's big breakout album. It was so popular that they were pulling singles out of the album for three years through 1998. You can still hear these singles played on the radio today.

Because it was (and remains) so popular, I never felt the need to actively seek out songs off this album. They have simply been around, ever-present. I like a fair number of songs off this album, and they do transport me back to the mid-90s. However, because the songs are everywhere, I don't think I need to specifically listen to the album on its own, and you don't either.

The most remarkable thing about this weeks #4 album is that LeAnn Rimes was thirteen years old when it was recorded and released. Although this is not my type of music (I had zero listens of her on last.fm before this week), I can say she is clearly gifted and her singing was not that of a teenager.

Naming your album as a thirteen year old Blue is a gutsy thing to do when one of the greatest albums of all time (by Joni Mitchell) is also named Blue. Of course, Blue is a single word and a common color, so it's not like Rimes named her album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Thriller.

As for the album itself, other than her skills as a singer, I have nothing to say about it. I don't think I've missed anything by not listening to her music and I won't be doing it intentionally going forward. Entirely skippable.

This week has been a bit of a "staycation" for me and my family. Originally we were planning on driving through southern Colorado for a few days, but there are a number of wildfires there and we decided against that. The fires have been burning for some time, and we might have done something else, but we never got our act together. It's just as well because as it turns out, I've had to do at least a little bit of work each day of the week. Monday I actually went to the office to finish something left over from Friday. I've been doing my best to not do work, and mostly succeeding.

All of this is to say that this week has been a bit unusual. Nevertheless, I will give you what you came for, a review of this weeks #1 album, It Was Written by Nas. I can make this brief: I have no interesting thoughts about this album. It's standard mid-90s rap. I've never been big into Nas, and this album didn't change my mind. Meh.

During the school year, I am able to almost never drive a car during the school/work week. I can get where I'm going, with what I'm going there with (e.g. a kid, a laptop, some light groceries, etc), by bicycle. Right now it's summer, and because of where and when various summer camps drop-off and pickups are, I'm driving every day. I would prefer to not do this, but it's only for ten weeks or so, and I can manage it.

What I'm here to complain about, however, is something else. Because I'm driving more, I'm impacted by summer road construction projects, and I find them frustrating. For those of you who don't commute by bicycle regularly, I'll explain. When you commute by bicycle, you know exactly how long it will take to go from A to B. This might not be true in Amsterdam or Copenhagen, but here there's never enough bicycle traffic to impact travel times. But with driving, I have to budget in extra time for construction zones that may or may not have a lane restriction in place. I find this annoying and inconvenient.

Sitting in these backups and seeing only a handful of workers actually doing anything at any one time has given me time to develop an opinion. In short, all publicly-funded works should include the cost to the public in terms of delays and inconvenience when comparing competitive bids. These costs won't actually be paid, but they will be used to compare the true public cost of each project. Let me explain with an example.

Let's say a road needs repaving, and there are two bids:

• Company A will do it for $100,000 and take 30 days
• Company B will do it for $150,000 and take 15 days

Next, using traffic data and other factors, it's found that each day of construction would cost $4,000 from the public in delays, fuel burned in extra traffic, and so on. Bringing in these costs, the true public cost of each bid is:

• Company A $100,000 + 30 * $4,000 = $220,000
• Company B $150,000 + 15 * $4,000 = $210,000

Using this policy, Company B would win the contract despite coming in with a higher bid.

I haven't invented anything here, these are called external costs, and our society would work much better if they were more effectively and consistently applied to taxpayer-funded projects. With penalties for missed deadlines, it would encourage competence and efficiency. Instead of sitting in traffic seeing only five people working at any one time for six weeks (ask me how I know this), you'd see dozens working for only a few days or a week. The public perception of government projects would improve and society would be better for it.

Sadly, because it would be good for society, this will never happen.

There's only one word to describe this album: sex. That's the only topic of every song on the #5 album this week, the eponymous Keith Sweat.

Much of popular music is about sex and relationships, so this album isn't out of line being so focused on those topics. I'm not that into R&B, and this album did nothing for me. Check it out, or don't. If you do, you might want to put on a silk robe first.

Hitting #2 in it's first week on the charts, Secrets is my second Toni Braxton album I've reviewed. It's also the second album she released.

There's only one notable song on the album, Un-Break My Heart, but it's quite a notable song, hitting #1 in many countries around the world. You've almost certainly heard it before, and it still gets radio airplay.

My assessment of this album is very similar to my review of her first album. It's solid mid-90s R&B, but not my usual cup of tea.

Here is the 2026 page for the Tour Pool I've been a part of for 19 years. It's fairly early in the Tour, so it's too early to say how well Team Florky will do.

Like many albums by (I'll say diplomatically) "experienced artists" I review, Banana Wind is a shooting star in the top 10 rankings. Last week it was at #4, this week it's #6, and it never apears in the top 10 again.

That's about right for this Jimmy Buffett album, the second I've reviewed. It's not a great album. The most interesting thing on the album is the song Desdemona's Building a Rocket Ship which has the lines

A woman on a mission, quite familiar with quasars Her heart is in the kitchen, but her soul is in the stars

When I heard this song I laughed because it's such a ridiculous rhyme.

That's the beginning and the end of what's interesting about this album. Like the other Buffett album, this one should be forgotten.

I find that the less I am moved by an album, the slower I am to post a review of it here. My emotion about the album can be positive or negative, but when it's strongly "meh," I struggle to work up the energy to review it. This review could be considered late in less than four hours!

This weeks album, Load by Metallica, is one of those albums. On Last.fm, there are only two songs from this album in the top 40 Metallica singles. It appears I've listened to the album once before in 2011, but I don't recall doing that and this most recent listen didn't trigger any memories.

This is not Metallica's best effort, and I'll be surprised if I listen to this again in another 15 years, or ever. You can skip it.

Tracy Champan isn't exactly a one-hit wonder, but she's never matched nor bettered her epoymous first album in popularity and quality. New Beginning took 29 weeks to reach #4 but apparently sold nearly as well as her first album. However it only has one hit single, Give Me One Reason, which on last.fm has 1/4 the listeners than her biggest hit Fast Car.

I'm not the biggest Tracy Chapman fan. She's not bad, but not my first choice, and this album didn't change my mind. It's fine. You might like it. Or not.

Hitting #2 on its first week in the charts, Down on the Upside by Soundgarden is the second Soundgarden album I've reviewed. Following up the massive hit Superunknown was always going to be difficult, and Down on the Upside probably did just about as well as could be hoped. It had a few big hits, including Blow Up the Outside World and Burden in My Hand.

As the final album before a 15 year hiatus, it is a good continuation of Soundgarden's sound. If you're in the mood for some grunge, but you don't want to hear Smells Like Teen Spirit or Black Hole Sun again, this is a decent option.

In January I posted about a house for sale in Boulder that I was slightly obsessed with. You can click through that link for the full story, but the short version is the sellers were asking for too much money for over a year. I had a bet with myself that the final sale price would be no more than $2.3 million. I can happily report that I was 100% correct: the house sold two days ago for $2,225,000, over a million dollars below the initial asking price.

As glad I am to be correct, I hope the developer/seller didn't lose money. I want new housing to be built in Boulder, and if developers lose money, that won't happen. At the same time, I don't want sellers (including private parties) being overly greedy, and I do have a little bit of schadenfreude when unreasonable sellers are shown that the housing market can have some logical sense.

There's very similar new build, unsold house in Boulder that was initially listed just after the one above. It hasn't sold likely because it has yet to fall below 70% of its initial asking price. It is also being sold by a developer. I probably won't post about it when it sells, but the fact that it hasn't sold yet, when the one above has, should tell the developer that they need to lower the price more (and be less greedy).

Sadly, there's always truly greedy (and/or delusional) developers, like this one. They have dropped the price less than $150,000 over a year and a half on an initial asking price of $4.7 million. By my math, they need to drop by at least ten times that before it will sell. I hope they enjoy paying property taxes, insurance, utilities, and the construction loan on an empty house for another 15 years!